Gamification has tremendous potential in the education space. How can we use it to deliver truly meaningful experiences to students? Learn all about the impact of gaming on education in this infographic.

This article is by Harry Kraemer, professor of management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and author of Becoming the Best: Build a World-Class Organization Through Values-Based Leadership.

In late 2013 the online retailer Zappos announced that it would adopt “holacracy”—an organizational structure without job titles—to banish bureaucracy, essentially getting rid of managers and putting everyone in charge of their own work and how it gets done. The company is to be commended for attacking the scourge of excess bureaucracy that can bog down any organization, but eliminating managers may not be the best way.

“ Holacracy is a new way of running an organization that removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across clear roles, which can then be executed autonomously, without a micromanaging boss.”
Via Riaz Khan

EVERY so often a company emerges from the herd to be lauded as the embodiment of leading-edge management thinking. Think of Toyota and its lean manufacturing system, say, or GE and Six Sigma excellence. The latest candidate for apotheosis is Zappos, an online vendor of shoes and clothes (owned by Amazon), which believes that happy workers breed happy customers. Tony Hsieh, its boss, said last year that he will turn the firm into a “holacracy”, replacing its hierarchy with a more democratic system of overlapping, self-organising teams. Until Zappos embraced it, no big company had taken holacracy seriously. Indeed, not all of Zappos’ 1,500-strong workforce are convinced that it can work.

The guys at Undercurrent have been publishing some smart thinking around organizational structures and culture of late. Organizational culture, structures and processes is the stuff that makes for real change.

With the Winter holiday shopping season, fashion apparel retailer Zara has been the focus of media attention — the New York Times recently profiled the innovative fast fashion business model pioneered by Zara, while Elizabeth Cline's book on the costs of fast fashion has climbed up the sales charts.

In a recent interview with Scott Anthony, managing director at innovation consulting firm Innosight, we discussed how large corporations are becoming more and more entrepreneurial, the variety of forces driving this shift in behavior, examples of successful innovation at scale, and much more.

"Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” — Tim Brown “A business model described the rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value” — Alex Osterwalder
Via Len Netti

Metropolis Magazine The Highs and Lows of “Design Thinking” Metropolis Magazine “Design Thinking” has become fashionable in management circles; it's their latest “holy grail.” Training programs are popping up all over the place.
Via A. Kosuke

“ Holacracy is a social technology or system of organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a fractal holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested at the top of a hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted in for-profit and non-profit organizations in the U.S., France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. [Wikipedia] A famous...”
Via Kevin Watson

“Zappos may have gained notoriety in recent months for being the latest company to move to the holacracy model of self-management, but when it comes to golden success stories, others are leading the way. If you're thinking about following their lead, consider these 6 cautionary points first. ”
Via Claude Emond

“ Have you heard about Holacracy? If you’re watching the startup and tech scene, then there’s a pretty good chance you have. Holacracy is a management-free way to run a company. It’s been around for a few years, but it may...Continue reading”
Via Riaz Khan

Open innovation, with roots in Procter & Gamble’s well-known “Connect + Develop” strategy, blends a ‘firm’s internal assets with the seemingly limitless knowledge pool outside of the ‘firm. “Open innovation is about combining your assets with the assets of the world . Put them together so that you can drive superior shareholder value for the company and satisfaction for the customer,” Huston said. One important capability for driving open innovation is the establishment of an innovation hub, which Munoz described in detail for attendees at the Wharton University Mack Center for Technological Innovation.

“About 20% of firms based their pricing on real data from their customers. This is mind-boggling - and it present a huge opportunity. Business model innovation is challenging, but that's why it provides such a great opportunity.”
Via Don Dea

“ Both Lean Startup and Design Thinking are promising approaches in order to target innovation. The Lean Startup concept is an appropriate choice for creating new businesses through development of an already existing idea ...”
Via Burrough

So here's the interesting question: is innovation emergent, constructed, coerced or otherwise imposed on an organizational culture? Clearly, almost every firm was "innovative" at one time, when it was a scrappy newcomer and had to out-innovate the competition to win.
Via Peter Verschuere

Understanding design and design thinking today is a major challenge since it has so many forms and those working in a variety of domains exhibit capabilities and competencies drawn from a vast array of traditional ...
Via A. Kosuke

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